Car bomb suspect was not entrapped, federal prosecutors say

He was young but had a specific idea he had articulated over and over on the Internet: to wage violent jihad against American citizens, authorities say.

And when it came time to carry it out, Adel Daoud stood in an alley and pulled a trigger on what he believed was a 1,000-pound car bomb outside a Chicago bar, the charges allege.

Federal prosecutors at a Thursday detention hearing for Daoud strongly challenged suggestions by Daoud’s attorneys in the wake of the charges that the Hillside resident was a misguided teen led into the ruse by undercover FBI agents and operatives who had built the fake bomb and given him the trigger.

“He talked about how many people he wanted killed in this attack,” Assistant U.S. Attorney William Ridgway said. “With every step, the defendant was pushing this operation forward. The defendant stood firm.”

Daoud, who turns 19 on Friday, was ordered held in custody by U.S. Magistrate Judge Arlander Keys pending trial on charges that could bring life imprisonment.

Ridgway told Keys that Daoud spent months performing searches on the Internet before he began communicating with the undercover FBI operatives.

“In other words, the defendant was predisposed,” Ridgway said. Proving a defendant is predisposed to commit a crime is key to rejecting an entrapment defense.

But Thomas Anthony Durkin, Daoud’s attorney, strongly attacked the government’s case, accusing the FBI of setting up the teen. Durkin told Keys that the undercover agent even pretended to have a sheik who supported the plot.

“Never in my career have I seen the FBI go to this length with respect to trying to set someone up,” said the veteran attorney, who has represented other terrorism suspects. “This case stinks.”